Carpenter Brut – Turbo Killer
2016 · Directed by Seth Ickerman (Raphaël Hernandez & Savitri Joly-Gonfard)
284K Likes
Best comments
1.“Man, these Hot Wheels commercials are getting weird.”
More comments
- 2.“This is my favorite video about a guy rescuing his Australian Christian sister-in-law from go-go dancer jail. Fast cars, action, upbeat music... it's got everything!”
- 3.“This is how my mom and dad met...”
The story
Carpenter Brut is Frenchman Franck Hueso, who makes darksynth: pounding retro electronic music with a metal streak and a deep love of the 1980s. For Turbo Killer he gave the directing duo Seth Ickerman (really Raphaël Hernandez and Savitri Joly-Gonfard, who had already made videos for his first three EPs) carte blanche. His only ask was a few characters he had in his head.
They spent about six months on it and came back with something that looks far more expensive than it was. Crystal-powered spaceships that work like magic. Old gas-guzzler car chases. Creepy, leering villains inspired by the art on Brut's EP covers. The story is deliberately loose, more gut than brain, like a clip ripped out of the middle of a movie you'll never find. The cemetery was scanned in with photogrammetry, and the cars are 1/18-scale models blended with CGI. Handmade tricks and modern effects, all bent toward that eighties glow.
It won Best VFX at the 2016 Berlin Music Video Awards, and it worked so well that the Ickerman crew crowdfunded a sequel on Kickstarter: Blood Machines, a 50-minute space opera about two hunters chasing a ghost across the galaxy. A music video that grew up to be a movie.
